A podcast stunned me stupid today. I wasn’t expecting to relate instinctively to a heroin addict describing the high. “Oh my gosh, it was the best feeling. I hated my life so much but that made me feel so good and so confident. It kinda made it feel like I was invincible but nothing really mattered, if that makes any sense.” I’ve never done heroin, but it’s a feeling I know intimately, and I found myself feeling homesick.

“Depression scoops out your insides and tosses them to the winds. Realizing you are depressed is, in and of itself, depressing. Especially since I have been evading this particular diagnostic destiny since I was a child.

It seems ridiculous now, claiming health through diagnostic omission. Lacking a chart in a shrink’s office with my name, I was therefore safe and healthy? I suffered for a lot longer than necessary, and told myself that life was just this hard. That maybe I needed to build a capacity for happy. In darker moments, I shrugged off happy as something that I simply didn’t deserve.”

Think about the time we spend engaged in debate: pleading, proving or otherwise bargaining for ourselves and our perspectives. At work. At home. In the classroom. In our own minds. On social media, especially. Sometimes we offer a point of view rooted in our most cherished beliefs, our deepest convictions. More often, though, we might find ourselves frothily insisting that, yes, we are sure we refilled the goddamn printer paper.